How to play and win

Piter Cieslinski: Not so long ago two male Serbs and a female Hungarian won over 2 million British pounds in roulette in a London Ritz casino.

Piter Wolowik, a postgraduate student at the Institute of Electronics and Telecom at Pozna; Polytechnic, Poland.

You can start betting in roulette from the moment the ball is thrown till the croupier says "no more bets". Theoretically, the game is random and it is difficult to guess which number the ball will into. However, the players had that tiny device which worked similarly to the police radar checking the speed of the car while driving it. Using that "technical help" they set the speed of the ball, and that allowed them to guess which sector of the wheel the ball will fall into.

They still were not certain where the ball would precisely fall but the theory of probability was on their side not the casino`s.

Yes. Normally, the probability of the ball falling into a sector emboding one third of the periphery is 1-3. Whereas, having a scanner we can estimate i.e. that the probability of the ball falling into a given sector is no much bigger than i.e. 4-9 or 1-2. Now, it is the case of putting it into the correct estimation of stakes and bets. It is nothing new anyway. I have read that after WW II some mathematicians in the U.S.A. built such electronic devices which secured them predominance in casinos. And there were no computers yet. The player could only estimate- in his head- the speed of the ball and the spinning wheel, based on that the switches which controlled the logical system of the crossbars were set. Those devices were not as advanced as they are nowadays but it was enough to gain a little bit of prevalence over the casino.

And Mathematics gives a formula how to change the prevalence into winnings.

Please, tell me what it is.

It is a simple mathematical formula called Kelly`s criterion.

I`m guessing that Kelly must have been an addicted gambler.

John Kelly worked in famous Bell`s labolatories of AT&T consortium. He was working on the theory of information and coding transmission channel in telecom. His formula, invented in 1956, was all about it. Then, it turned out that it had to do with gambling because there are some analogies between the data transmission and managing the capital.

But was Kelly a gambler? As far as I know, inveterate gamblers do not show anything because they are busy playing and not making calculations, besides they do not have time to think.